1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image data management apparatus and method for managing image data and an image data search apparatus and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image management system (also referred to as “an electronic album”) has recently been developed which manages digital image data captured by digital still cameras or digital image data obtained by scanning images (e.g., images captured on silver-halide films) with a personal computer or a dedicated apparatus to display the digital image data on a monitor, such as a cathode-ray tube (CRT) or a liquid crystal display.
Such an image management system stores image data in a storage, such as a hard disk or a high-capacity flash memory, and includes a search function of searching for image data corresponding to a designated shooting date. A user can search for desired image data among many image data stored in the storage by using the search function.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-358306 discusses an image information search method for carrying out searching based on date information associated with an event so as to facilitate user's image searching based on a date.
However, while the shooting date and time is automatically appended to image data shot by a digital still camera during shooting, the shooting date and time may not be appended to image data captured by a scanner.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-148692 discusses an image input system which analyzes the shooting date and time contained in an image via an optical character recognition (OCR) when the image is read by a scanner, and appends shooting date and time information to the scanned image data, as in the case of a digital still camera.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-261749 discusses an image management system which appends shooting date and time information to image data containing no shooting date and time by using a calendar type user interface.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-30763 discusses a mechanism for, when an attribute ambiguous in representation such as a level of clearness is input, graphically displaying a preview image of an image to which the same attribute has been appended and its attribute value so as to facilitate user's appending an ambiguous attribute to the image.
However, the following problems may occur in the system that appends shooting date and time information to image data containing no shooting date and time information: (1) when no shooting date and time is contained in an image, shooting date and time information cannot be obtained since analysis via an OCR cannot be carried out, and (2) even in cases where a user manually inputs shooting date and time information, the inputted date may not be reliable since it is often difficult for the user to remember shooting date and time.
As a result, in the case of processing image data shot by digital still camera and image data captured by a scanner in a mixed manner, a user cannot search both image data in a unified manner by using the shooting date and time as a search key.